Avatar of rebellion, buccaneer, soul survivor, as well as the coolest dude on the planet, Keith Richards – the myth – has meant so many different things to so many different people that it is easy to overlook the quintessential Englishness that still truly defines him. By reclaiming for the first time on film his suburban roots, this documentary explores the impact he has had on how we all live our lives today.
It is no coincidence that more bombs fell on Keith’s birthplace Dartford during the war than anywhere else in Britain. Nor that the ultimate survivor himself should escape a direct hit from one of Hitler’s doodlebugs, which sprayed his cot with bricks and mortar, before he could walk or talk.In the film, Keith’s visceral journey through the deprivations of those post-war years allows him to speak with hard-fought experience and unique authority on the wider preconditions of the 40s and 50s – rationing, austerity, the beginning of the National Health and the end of National Service among them – which fed into those attitudes and emerging lifestyles that finally achieved critical mass in the early 1960s.
Ending at the point the Rolling Stones began, the film will explore, through Keith’s own coming of age, the cultural undercurrents and transformative thinking which occurred in Britain during those often underestimated decades, and made possible the great worldwide explosion of English rock music in the 60s, of which he was one of the crucial detonators.
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